Symphony bids adieu to season with surfing theme

features@santacruzsentinel.com In a festive culmination to the 2015-16 season, the Santa Cruz Symphony presented “Surfing with the Symphony” last Saturday evening at the Civic Auditorium. The pre-concert fun began with a surfing-themed street party featuring the Kuzanga Marimba band entertaining crowds of picnickers, many donning their best aloha wear.

The story of Santa Cruz is emphatically tied up with the history of surfing and in 2012 the coast was dedicated as a World Surfing Reserve. These legendary shores have witnessed mavericks young and old as they search for that “perfect wave.” It is this connection which identifies so much of the culture of in the town, that the Symphony sought to embrace with the final concert of the season. To enhance the theme the Symphony was joined by the now legendary California band, and staple of the summer Beach Boardwalk concert series Papa Doo Run Run.

The end of season pops concert is traditionally the primary fundraising event of the year, and this year it featured a live surf-themed auction which was met with enthusiastic bids. Much of the money raised is spent on a prodigious outreach program of music education that the Symphony has sponsored since the inception of its youth education program in 1966. The Symphony’s in-class Music Listening Program makes it possible for elementary school teachers to introduce classical music to their students on a daily basis.

Musical director Daniel Stewart described how the program, piloted in 2012 with 10 teachers in four schools, targets second- through fifth-graders. Currently, nearly 2,000 students experience classical music daily in 16 of the County’s 31 elementary schools. Accompanied by trained volunteer docents, professional musicians from the orchestra visit fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms throughout the county. Students are introduced to instruments of the orchestra and the concept of a symphonic orchestra. They learn about the training and the vocational life of musicians and are prepared for the experience of a live classical concert. The visits are provided free to participating schools. So it was disappointing to see so few children in the seats on Saturday night. In fact there were an awful lot of empty seats at the concert.

The first half was devoted to three short water-themed orchestral works beginning with Badelt’s “The Black Pearl” from “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Mendelssohn’s overture “The Hebrides, Fingal’s Cave” accompanied the short film “Extreme Surfing with Local Legends” by Chris Thompson, which was projected onto a large screen above the orchestra. Thompson’s “A Visual History of Surfing in Santa Cruz: A Look Back” featured great vintage footage of local surfing accompanied by a live performance of Smetana’s “The Moldau,” a tone poem depicting one of Bohemia’s great rivers. Both films were created by this Bay Area film maker exclusively for this event.

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As soon as Papa Doo Run Run took to the stage for the second half, the audience toe-tapped their way onto the floor and relished the opportunity to dance along to some of the iconic songs of the Beach Boys and Frankie Valli, along with a smattering of Johnny Cash and the Who thrown in for good measure. In these they were accompanied by the Symphony, now attired in Hawaiian shirts, as was the maestro himself.